The Kitchen Table Debrief – MAYDAY! The Goodness Spec

Featured Author:

Ed Raposo

Contributing author, Ed Raposo is a retired Fire Chief with the Nasonville Fire Department in Nasonville, Rhode Island. He joined the department in 1991 as a firefighter and became an EMT in 1992. He received his Firefighter Level I in 1994 and Firefighter Level II in 2001 from the Rhode Island Fire Academy. Along with attending numerous training courses, including courses at the National Fire Academy in MD, Chief Raposo also participated in ride-alongs with the Providence Fire Department and spent time in Northern California observing, drilling, and going on calls with CALFIRE during the record breaking wildland fire season of 2008.

He is currently a State Fire Academy Instructor and has held the positions of: Safety Officer, Fire Lieutenant, Fire Captain, Fire Chief, Assistant Chief and Fire Marshal for Nasonville. While Captain, he was also the Training Officer for several years. After his retirement as Fire Chief he was asked to take the position of Assistant Chief where he continues to make contributions to the ongoing refinement of the department.

Along with his time in the Fire Service, Chief Raposo has also held management and leadership positions in Information Technology and Business since 1980.

In this “Kitchen Table Debrief” I will propose some techniques to help avoid common obstacles when documenting SOPs/SOGs. Actually, some of these issues exist in more than just our documented processes, but this is how they most often rear their ugly heads!

I have a confession to make. Actually, I have several confessions to make, but I think I’ll limit myself to only a few for this article:

Confession #1:

My Fire Department does not have a complete set of Standard Operating Procedures / Standard Operating Guidelines (SOPs/SOGs) describing all of our process guidelines. I know, I know! I feel terrible about it, but it is the truth. We have SOME SOPs/SOGs, but we do not have a COMPLETE set.

Now, before you hose-draggers out there start smirking, please read the whole article…

You may wonder why a department would choose not to have a complete set of procedures… I did too. So I decided to review what we had for procedures and update them, and create a list of what we were missing. As I did this I also looked for reasons why we were missing so many. Here is what I found:

Writing a good set of complete SOPs is not an easy task. It is a time consuming and difficult process. My business background has shown me that a few (no, that’s not true,) a lot (OK, that’s not true either. Let’s be honest) MOST processes and/or procedures were poorly developed, incorrect, or written by the wrong people. Many simply do not apply to the task they are supposed to support any more. Many times when a process/procedure is written, the wrong people write it; therefore, it makes no sense and cannot/should not be followed. They are incorrect before the ink is even dry.

Once written they need to be periodically evaluated for applicability and relevance; And they should be upgraded as needed. SOPs/SOGs truly are living documents.

So, while embarking on corrective action for my department, I tried to think “out-of-the-box”: What if all the departments in our responding area followed the same SOP/SOGs?! Nah, that goal was too aggressive. To get consensus across the board would be a very difficult task. But, rather than head back in-the-box, I considered the question: why this is so tough for us?!